Weightless — Blackbird Archive

← v18n1, Spring 2019

I pray that the crows will return to my yard

so I can watch them pluck off their plumes

like soft black knives, alive the way words

are alive inside the earth of our bones. Did you know

I were a cave of honey. Come, listen to me speak. Let my mouth

me. You’ve sent these crows to my yard to spy,

to arrow their wedged and dark heads down to the earth

as if they are pointing to where I’ve been.

desire language body loss

Ösel Jessica Plante

Ösel Jessica Plante’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Best New Poets 2017 , Best Small Fictions 2016 , Narrative Magazine , and Passages North , among others. She is winner of the 2018 Meridian Editors Prize in poetry and is a former fellow of the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MA in English from the University of North Texas, an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and is pursuing a PhD in poetry at Florida State University. She teaches and writes in Tallahassee, Florida. Photo by Saige Roberts